A Measurement Study of Wechat Mini-Apps
A Measurement Study of Wechat Mini-Apps
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DOI：
10.1145/3460081
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发表时间：
2021-06
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Yue Zhang;Bayan Turkistani;A. Yang;Chaoshun Zuo;Zhiqiang Lin
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文献类型：
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作者：
Yue Zhang;Bayan Turkistani;A. Yang;Chaoshun Zuo;Zhiqiang Lin
一种新的移动的计算范式，被称为迷你应用，自2017年微信推出以来，在过去几年中迅速发展。在这种模式下，宿主应用允许其最终用户在其内部安装和运行小应用，使宿主应用能够围绕（类似于Google Play和Apple AppStore）构建生态系统，丰富宿主应用的功能，并在不离开宿主应用的情况下为移动的用户提供更高的便利性。据报道，微信中有超过数百万个小应用。然而，关于这些迷你应用程序的信息在聚合级别上知之甚少。在本文中，我们介绍了MiniCrawler，这是第一个可扩展的开源微信小应用爬虫，已索引了超过1，333，308个小应用。它利用大量的逆向工程技术来揭示微信中用于抓取小应用的接口和API。通过抓取的迷你应用程序，我们然后在聚合级别上测量它们的资源消耗、API使用率、库使用率、混淆率、应用程序分类和应用程序评级。本文详细介绍了我们如何开发MiniCrawler和我们的测量结果。
A new mobile computing paradigm, dubbed mini-app, has been growing rapidly over the past few years since being introduced by WeChat in 2017. In this paradigm, a host app allows its end-users to install and run mini-apps inside itself, enabling the host app to build an ecosystem around (much like Google Play and Apple AppStore), enrich the host's functionalities, and offer mobile users elevated convenience without leaving the host app. It has been reported that there are over millions of mini-apps in WeChat. However, little information is known about these mini-apps at an aggregated level. In this paper, we present MiniCrawler, the first scalable and open source WeChat mini-app crawler that has indexed over 1,333,308 mini-apps. It leverages a number of reverse engineering techniques to uncover the interfaces and APIs in WeChat for crawling the mini-apps. With the crawled mini-apps, we then measure their resource consumption, API usage, library usage, obfuscation rate, app categorization, and app ratings at an aggregated level. The details of how we develop MiniCrawler and our measurement results are reported in this paper.